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I'd love to see a program in or near Chicago, mostly for purely selfish reasons, since I live here. I was at the last game at the UIC Pavilion in 1996, when Michigan beat UIC something like 12 to 1. (Then they dropped hockey to hire a basketball coach, but they've been terrible ever since.)

Northwestern could probably pull it off. Chicago is, of course, an original six town, and the Blackhawks are popular now. There's no college hockey here, though Notre Dame and Wisconsin are each within a two hour drive, and it's a bus ride from every other B1G hockey school. What team wouldn't want a road trip to Chicago?

On the other hand, the Frozen Four was just here, and if I wasn't already following college hockey, I don't think I would have known about it. And that game at Soldier Field a few years ago wasn't a great event either. But those were just bad implementations.

I have to say that I find this "Fire Red" talk mystifying. How can you say that he doesn't relate to kids today or get the best out of them when we just saw a line wirh three blue chip recruits score over 80 goals? Lots of kids still want to play for him.

Yeah, we couldn't beat NoDak, but not many teams can. And, hockey plinko. And maybe Red hasn't one the big one for a while, but he has more tourney wins than any active coach. Who has a better resume? Maybe Jack Parker, but nobody else.

Mel Pearson is a great coach at Tech, and he should get consideration to be our next coach when Red does retire, but there's no guarantee at all that he'll be able to run a top tier program like Michigan successfully. I mean, was Tech in the tourney?

I would have to go with Brendan Morrison. He was all-everything, a Hobey winner and three time finalist, scored the game winner in the national championship game, the program's all-time leading scorer, etc. And let's not forget he stayed four years. He had that knack for making every player on his team better, and was a great leader and captain as well. I would say he's the best hockey player I've ever seen at Michigan, with Marty Turco a close second (though I know this post is just about forwards). He deserves to be in the discussion of the best players ever in college hockey.

That said, probably the most successful hockey player ever to play at Michigan, including an NHL career, was one Gordon "Red" Berenson. Many years ago, he was the best player in all of college hockey, the first college player to go directly to the NHL, and he still belongs on the list of all time greats, though he's obviously more well-known as a coach these days. Wally Grant should get some mentions too.

Kyle Connor is right up there with some of the best forwards we've ever had, certainly one of the best pure goal scorers. If he stays a few more years, he could be the best ever. But not after only one year.

But the best thing about the CCHA was being able to follow the team on road trips to so many schools within a three hour driving radius from Ann Arbor, such as Bowling Green, Western, Ferris, and Notre Dame, in addition to current B1G schools OSU and FYS. Lake State, Northern, and Miami weren't much farther. And UIC (Illinois-Chicago) was always a great trip, while it lasted. Plus, we had the CCHA playoffs at the Joe every year, and home playoff rounds as well.

I had so many fantastic road trips in the mid-90's, in the Hockeymobile (even though I was lucky I never crashed the damn thing with its bald tires on all those icy roads). From 1994 to 1998, I probably went to about 80 percent of all Michigan Hockey games, home and away (including playoffs). That was an awesome time for me. Of course, the team being so good back then made it a lot more fun.

It's different now. It's a lot harder to drive to Madison or Minneapolis for a weekend (although at least hockey usually is on weekends, unlike hoops). And there are no longer home playoffs, plus the conference playoffs are in Minnesota every other year. The number of games you can get to every year with a three or four hour drive from A2 are much fewer.

Of course, now that I'm living in Chicago and having to watch most of the Michigan Hockey games on TV, I'm glad for the Big Ten and its much better TV coverage. But yeah, the CCHA was something special, and I feel a loss as well.

There are lots of alumni of Michigan and MSU and every other B1G school in Chicago. But I don't think anyone local who wasn't already following Michigan or Michigan State Hockey on social media even knew about this game at all. There was absolutely no advertising or promotion of this game in Chicago, at least none that I saw.

The other thing is that, as much as Chicago is a great pro sports town (though I'm a Boston kid myself - Go Pats!), it's kind of a crappy town for college sports. There's Northwestern, I guess, and DePaul, but those are small schools with not really great athletic traditions. Illinois might as well be in Iowa. Notre Dame gets a lot of press, but South Bend is 90 miles away, and they think they're an East Coast school anyway. Obviously there's no college hockey anywhere nearby. (I used to think that Robert Morris had a hockey team, but that's the *other* Robert Morris University, in Pennsylvania.)

Oh, yeah, there's UIC, that vast expanse of concrete, which dropped their CCHA hockey team back in 1996 to hire a basketball coach who was supposed to bring them to the big time. Uh, yeah, great job there.

For me, it was nice to finally be able to see Michigan Hockey here in Chicago. I'm pretty sure it was their first game here since the very last game at the UIC Pavilion in '96 (which I was also at, even though I was still living in Ann Arbor at the time, because Chicago is always a great road trip, and I followed the team to almost every road game in the 96/97 and 97/98 seasons in the Hockeymobile).

But I can't say it was a great atmosphere. They wouldn't even let the bands play more than once in a period, except for after goals. That alone annoyed me so much that it took a lot away from my enjoyment of the game. At least we won.

Hopefully we'll see the boys back here in Chicago at the Frozen Four in a couple years!

The former players you list were all great, but it wasn't Hagelin and Rust and Caporusso who got us to the final game last year and shut out North Dakota. Or at least it wasn't their scoring; it was team defense and great goaltending. (Although I'm haunted by the two-on-one that Carl and Louie had late in regulation in the title game last year.)

I'm not sure the team "D" is on quite as much as last year's team down the stretch, but that's what's going to be the main factor in whether we can get back to the title game and win it. That's what Red coaches. And the close games are much better prep for the tourney than blowouts.

Anyway, the Pairwise and RPI and KRACH aren't perfect, but there's a reason we're ranked number two in all of them, and I think it's accurate. There have been no truly dominating teams this year, even BC. And if you throw out an inexplicably bad stretch in November, Michigan has been as consistently good as anyone, at least in terms of wins and losses, and that's really what it's all about. So we may not be a great team, but we're a pretty good team, and there's no other team who can really claim to be much more than that.

If you want to worry about anything, worry about the power play. And of course, the somewhat arbitrary nature of single-elimination hockey. Any of the teams in this tournament could win any game, and most of them could win it all. But I'll take our chances with Hunwick. Let's do this!

Does anyone know which is the Michigan section at the Resch Center, and if there's a way to still get tickets in or near that section?

Also, if anyone is driving to Green Bay and wants to crash in Chicago on the way, you can stay at my place if you want to pick me up. I'll pay for gas for the Chicago to Green Bay leg and back. Contact me at [email protected] Thanks! Go Blue!

I"m pretty flexible. I just want to see some hockey. I already have a room at the hotel next to the rink for Friday and Saturday nights, so I pretty much just need to get there. Contact me at [email protected] Thanks!

Basically, the upshot for Michigan is, unless we lose two games at the Joe, we're pretty much locked into the number two or three spot overall. That almost ensures us the top seed in Green Bay, because the committee will likely want to keep Minnesota-Duluth in St. Paul, and both they and Minnesota are ranked high enough that they won't meet in the first round. I'm making travel plans for Green Bay now. (It's a relatively easy trip for me from Chicago anyway.)

Well, I don't have a passport. Most college students don't. For that matter, the majority of Americans, and even Michigan residents, don't have passports. Most estimates put passport owernship among U.S. citizens at about 30 percent. Being an illegal alien or not has nothing to do with it.

At any rate, why impose an extra burden on American fans to go to the playoffs so that Canadians can fill up the rink?

To what end does U.S. college hockey need exposure in Canada? Maybe for recruiting, sure, but it's not like Canadians are going to start up their own teams to compete for the U.S. national championship.

Also, U.S. citizens need a passport to travel to Canada these days. So you would fill a rink with a lot of neutral fans, but shut out most of the fans of the teams competing, just for "exposure?" Sorry, but I'm not ready to cede our national championship to Canada. The Frozen Four is for the players and the teams, but it's also for the fans, for us, not for Canadians. They have their own teams.

If you want exposure that's going to actually "grow the sport," then instead of Toronto, how about having the NCAA tournament in Chicago? Instead of encouraging a bunch of Canadians to fill a rink, how about exposing people from other Big Ten schools like Illinois and Northwestern to the sport? That's the way to grow the sport, by having more teams in the U.S., not by filling rinks in other countries.

As I noted in my comments on Michael Spath's article, while Toronto is a fine city, the problem with having the NCAA tournament there is that a passport is required for most U.S. citizens to travel to Canada. This would be a significant burden for many college hockey fans, especially students, wishing to follow their teams. It’s one thing to hop in the car and road trip to St. Paul, or even Tampa, on a whim; it’s another to go to a whole different country. If you can't legally travel there on short notice to follow your team, then Toronto is really no better than New Zealand.

It's true that some fans would plan ahead to obtain passports for the Frozen Four, but a lot of tickets get bought and sold right before the event when the teams are set, since lots of fans are more willing to travel at the last minute for a chance to see their team win a championship. Would fans of RIT have been able to see their team make an unexpected appearance in the 2010 Frozen Four if it had been held in Toronto?

Wanting to "grow the sport" is fine, but unless Canadian teams are going to somehow compete for the U.S. national championship in college hockey, there's not really much point in growing this particular sport north of the border. They already have hockey there, or so I've heard.

I submit that Toronto be replaced with Chicago in this scenario. Chicago is a great Original Six hockey city as well, and it seems to me that a more useful way to grow the sport of U.S. college hockey, in a way that's meaningful to Michigan, would be by encouraging other Big Ten schools like Illinois and Northwestern to start hockey teams than by encouraging Canadians to do... well, I'm not exactly sure what.

Doesn't the same logic about going on the road for the first two months of the season apply to softball too? If not, why not? I mean, Michigan has done pretty well recently in the Women's College World Series. What do the women know that their male counterparts don't?

Actually, it was Boston University who beat us in Milwaukee, with the BU band playing "On Wisconsin." That spoiled a much-anticipated matchup between Michigan and North Dakota in the final.

But you're right, it's been 20+ years of mostly frustration, at least at the very end. Although there have been a lot of great wins too. I think you need outstanding goaltending, and while we've had some good ones, we haven't had a truly dominating goaltender since Turco, until now. That's why we were so close last year.

RIght after our game, before the other games last night, we were in the top spot in the Pairwise and the RPI. We're only one thousandth of a point behind BC in RPI, which is the difference in their PWR comparison too. So making up that 0.001 in RPI would put us back into the top spot in the Pairwise. (However, our RPI will probably take a hit next weekend even if we sweep due to a drop in strength of schedule.) The other team winning a comparison against us is Minnesota-Duluth, and we have a good chance of passing them in the TUC comparison.